Media release

Date: June 09, 2000

Prof Fights "Brain Drain" While Advancing Computer Design

Despite the so-called brain drain --Canada's best and brightest
minds leaving for the money and opportunities of the U.S. --there is
still a cadre of world-class researchers who call Canada home.
Dr. Micaela Serra, of UVic's computer science department, is one who
has made a conscious choice to live and work in Canada. An
internationally-known expert in fault-tolerant testing for computer
chips --used in developing stable and robust computer components
--she is also an outspoken advocate for women in computer science.
Originally from Italy, Serra earned her degrees at the University of
Manitoba and UVic. In 1987 she became the first female faculty member
in UVic's computer science department.
Although many Canadian computer scientists have emigrated to Silicon
Valley or Redmond, Serra feels a sense of obligation to the taxpayers
of Canada. "I am very aware that taxes-- my taxes --are paying for my
research," she says.
It's a sense of obligation her students seem to echo. Most of Serra's
graduate students --even the exchange students --spend at least a few
years in Canada, returning the value of their taxpayer-subsidized
education through innovative technological research.
Supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council (NSERC), Serra and her graduate students have been
conducting research on hardware-software co-design since 1994. This
relatively new specialization encompasses some of the most
ground-breaking research in computer science today. Instead of slow
programs (the software) telling the fast machine (the hardware) what
to do, this emerging field blurs the line between program and
machine, resulting in faster configurations that are cheaper to
produce and easier to customize.
Most research on hardware-software co-design has focused on its use
in embedded systems --the miniature computers that run everything
from your car's fuel system to your microwave oven. "There are up to
1,000 microcontrollers or microprocessors in an average household,"
notes Serra, "and these implementations are based entirely on
hardware-software co-design principles."
In addition to embedded systems, hardware-software co-design is used
to develop chip accelerators for power-hungry processes such as
graphics cards, games and video boards.
Serra and her students also act as co-design consultants for local
technology-based industry. One local company uses specialized digital
signal processing and microprocessors to develop digital audio
products for the professional/commercial music industry. Another
works with the ever-widening field of "smart card" technologies. A
smart card --which is like a credit card with an embedded computer
chip --can acquire, store and use both cash and data. Popular in
Europe for everything from transit cards to medical records, their
use here is expected to skyrocket in the next few years.